2 A vital comment about people’s wishes

The idea of a living process includes the simple idea that what is built must arise in response to people’s actual feelings, their actual wishes!

This is important in software design as well. But it is even more important to really understand the underlying wishes, because people tend to tell us what they want by encoding them in too specific scenarios.

He found out that what people want most in the qualities of their dwellings are the following eight things, listed here in order of importance as rated by the families:

1. Each house should have a private garden.
2. It should be low-rise.
3. The user must be able to design the dwelling — exterior and interior — for themselves, according to their desires, to make their own living space unique.
4. The street has little traffic, so it becomes a place for play and chatter.
5. The amount of sunshine in the dwelling is more than we can typically get in a high rise apartment.
6. It is possible to park very near the house.
7. It is possible to enter the house directly from the street.
8. There are small shops near the house.

I feel strong about 3, 5, and 8. My opinion is different about 1, 2, and 6.

What is astonishing is certainly not any strangeness of the answers, but rather the fact that the municipalities creating housing all over the world, consistently and steadfastly ignore these answers, although they are obvious and although everybody knows them.

I’m a little uncomfortable with the proposed generality here, partly because I don’t agree with some of the answers. I do recognize that I don’t hold majority opinions in these cases, but what does that mean? Am I “wrong”? Or is this a case where individuality is not based on ego or image and can in fact be based on different requirements or at least a different weighting of what I consider important?

The result we got is not previously known, yet it follows naturally, directly from the wishes people have expressed.

This is where the adaptive process shines. When the goal is unclear, and there are requirements, unfolding can lead to unforeseen solutions that were difficult or impossible to “design” the classic way.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/10 “Belonging” in High-density Housing#